[POLL] System Builder Mistakes

[AlgaeEater]

You know the feeling.

It's been a whole 3 months saving up pennies and stealing your neighbor's newspaper in the morning. It's been a year of clipping coupons for 35 cents off Acme Meat-Substance Like Luncheon Meat. You've finally saved up for that killer rig of your dreams and you put it together after finally getting all your parts together.

The sweat beads on your forehead as you are about to press that button -- the POWER button -- on your case. You're about to experience that rush of pure computing power you've scrapped so hard for... and then suddenly your body shivers and your breath escapes from your body when you get your first problem. A MAJOR problem. A problem that prohibits you from your nerd like nirvana. The grasp of DEATH himself pats you on your shoulder as you begin to re-trace all your steps in what you did wrong, and why the fates are being so cruel to you.

Yes... it's this feeling. You've messed up something. The question is... what is it?

--------------------

Ok that was way more elaborate than it should have been... but I wanted to make things interesting . IN any case, what are your MOST common system building mistakes?

 

[yh125d]

By FAR the most common mistake is people forgetting the CPU power connector

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Originally posted by: AlgaeEater
You know the feeling.

It's been a whole 3 months saving up pennies and stealing your neighbor's newspaper in the morning. It's been a year of clipping coupons for 35 cents off Acme Meat-Substance Like Luncheon Meat. You've finally saved up for that killer rig of your dreams and you put it together after finally getting all your parts together.

The sweat beads on your forehead as you are about to press that button -- the POWER button -- on your case. You're about to experience that rush of pure computing power you've scrapped so hard for... and then suddenly your body shivers and your breath escapes from your body when you get your first problem. A MAJOR problem. A problem that prohibits you from your nerd like nirvana. The grasp of DEATH himself pats you on your shoulder as you begin to re-trace all your steps in what you did wrong, and why the fates are being so cruel to you.

Yes... it's this feeling. You've messed up something. The question is... what is it?

--------------------

Ok that was way more elaborate than it should have been... but I wanted to make things interesting . IN any case, what are your MOST common system building mistakes?

LMFAO!!!

 

[BW86]

case shorts are always my problem

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

By far, the biggest mistake is people installing everything rather than doing a minimal install before trying to boot.

 

[novasatori]

Always something to do with power for me.

Whether its not plugged into the outlet, the power supply, the monitor, the vga power, the extra CPU power cord they added a few years back, or a HD power cord

I always seem to miss one, and usually checking all those will solve the problem, if not I undo all the cables and redo them and 90% of the time that it enough to fix it, never had problems seating anything or with shorts.

 

[SonnyDaze]

Originally posted by: MagnusTheBrewer
By far, the biggest mistake is people installing everything rather than doing a minimal install before trying to boot.

AGREED 100%! I did that once and that's all it took. From then on I learned how to bench test all my components before installation. Nothing more frustrating then getting it all together to find out you have a bad mobo.

My biggest problem is backwards wiring on the header pins. On some mobos they put the + and - markings so far from the header pins I can't tell which is which. Of course it's a 50/50 chance of getting it right.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: yh125d
By FAR the most common mistake is people forgetting the CPU power connector

Done that once.

Miswiring the power/reset/HDled/powerled is also common, although I'm pretty careful about those now a days. (Read the manual.)

Used to put the floppy cable on backwards, back in the AT days. Back when they weren't keyed, and some floppy drives have pin1 near the power cable, and some don't.

For the most part, though, out of all the systems I've built, I've never had the "POST uh-ohs". They power on first time all the time for me. At least as far as DOA POSTs go.

Edit: Then again, I've sworn off things like ECS motherboards.

 

[boran]

My most common mistake is with the keyboard. I still have a PS2 plug keyboard (I like the way it types, and it works) but it is not color coded and often I end up plugging it in the mouse port. Now I don't know if every motherboard behaves like this, but for my last three builds this causes nothing to happen when you press power. So far it has happened to me every time. And every time it freaks me out.

 

[alevasseur14]

I forgot to hook up the power cable to my brand new 8800 GTS back in the day. That freaked me out.

The last time I built a machine for someone, I remembered how much of a pain in the ass it was to install XP from a SATA DVD drive to a SATA hard drive. To top it all off the mobo didnt' like my USB floppy drive so I ended up using an IDE CD ROM drive I still had laying around and setting the HD to ATA mode. It wasn't the most elegant solution in the world but it did the trick long enough to get the computer up and running, back to the customer, and most importantly: OUT OF MY HOUSE!

 

[TheStu]

First time I had a GPU that required a separate power line I got freaked out something rotten when I first turned it on. This high pitched squeal was coming from my case and I couldn't figure out what was going on!

Once when reassembling my system I seated the GPU right next to the AGP slot. In case you are curious, it won't work that way.

 

[theMan]

how about not realizing which HDD controller the hard drive is plugged into and not enabling it in the BIOS and therefore spending hours trying to figure out why your HDD isn't being detected?

 

[Texun]

OP that was a good intro. You ought to take up writing.

Most common screw-ups for me:

Forgetting to plug the power cable in the PS. I did that last week.
Getting the Floppy cables bass-ackwards almost every time I install one - which isn't that often anymore.
Getting the polarity of the pwr or hdd LED backwards and it won't light up.

 

[mmntech]

Originally posted by: TheStu
First time I had a GPU that required a separate power line I got freaked out something rotten when I first turned it on. This high pitched squeal was coming from my case and I couldn't figure out what was going on!

Ah, I did that when I got my Geforce 6600. It was the first card I had that required one. I've also freaked out once after a build wouldn't POST thinking the memory I had bought bad RAM, only to later realize I hadn't seated the CPU properly.

Tearing up my hands on sharp corners inside the case is another bad habit of mine.

 

[ChaiBabbaChai]

#1 problem for me = buying an AMD K6-II. Only other problems are related to OS boot files on boot drive.

 

[zCypher]

When setting up my new hardware, putting on the new HSF it seemed like I was gonna crush the CPU doing it! Turned out ok though. RAM went OK. When I went to connect the power cable from the PSU to the motherboard, I realized the motherboard's connector was bigger! I was sure that I was out of luck but when I checked the motherboard manual it was in fact backwards compatible, and it turned out OK.

When I was mounting the motherboard on the case, the little things on the case that you screw the motherboard into, dunno what to call them, well they weren't all in the same place since my new board is mATX, I had to start over a couple times cause of that, but no harm done.

When I finished plugging everything in put everything in place, made sure CMOS jumper was correct (it was ok by default), plugged in all the HD LED etc at first I thought one of them wasn't going to fit (2 pins intead of 3) but realized there were 2 places it could go, one of them had 3, so I guess they are not all alike (not sure if that was the HD LED or another one).

I first powered up the system and it was making an awful noise that sounded like a crappy CPU fan. I figured great, I had to get some kind of a dud somewhere didn't I. So I shut it off, and then I realized it was the wire from the fan... STUPID, should have made sure that was placed properly first. Inspected for damage, seemed fine ... placed it properly started up ok no more noise. Whew!

Now I will be setting up my 2 more GB of ddr2 and a tb sata so hopefully that will go smoothly. Some people have had issues using 4GB on the MSI G31M3-L so I will see how that goes. I got two exactly identical ones so hopefully it will be ok.